The Quintessence of Dust: Sovereignty and Creaturely Life
by Dimitris Vardoulakis
Wednesday, November 11, 2009 :: 4:30pm :: Heyman Center Board Room
There are two radically different ways of thinking about a politics of dust. The first comes from ancient Greece and it refers to the dust that Antigone sprinkled over Polynices’s dead body. This is dust as a symbol of defiance, dust that signifies resistance to Creon’s sovereign authority by evoking ancestral, sacred law – dust as a metonymy for revolutionary power. And there is also Sebald’s dust, the emblem of natural history, as Eric Santner brilliantly puts it, that is, as emblem of the destruction, the detritus that discloses a history not premised on progress and not promising ultimate redemption. In other words, Sebald’s dust has no defined revolutionary aim, but is rather an object linked to awakening and to a messianic temporality that retains a revolutionary possibility, albeit one that – unlike Antigone’s – does not challenge the sovereign directly. In-between these two opposed ways, there is Hamlet, who views man and woman as the quintessence of dust. Vardoulakis will explore what this quintessence might consist in through a detour via Hobbes, in order to derive some conclusions that relate to current debates about bare life and sovereignty.
Dimitris Vardoulakis is Lecturer at the University of Western Sydney. His books include The Doppelgänger: Literature’s Philosophy (Fordham UP, 2010), and as editor: Spinoza Now (U of Minnesota P, 2010), After Blanchot (2005), The Political Animal (special issue of Substance, 2008) and The Politics of Place (special issue of Angelaki, 2004).
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Building on Poulantzas: The Need for Reshaping the Theory of the State
by Constantine Tsoukalas, Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Political Theory, School of Law, University of Athens
Thursday, October 29, 2009 :: 4:30pm :: Heyman Center Board Room
Professor Constantine Tsoukalas is Greece's premier political theorist, with an illustrious career as a thinker, writer, and public intellectual, which begins with his classic The Greek Tragedy published by Penguin in London in 1969. He has written many articles in English and French since then, and a great number of books in Greek, among which are: Dependency and Reproduction (1975); Social Development and the State (1977); State, Society, and Labor in Postwar Greece (1986); Voyage in Logos and History (2 vols. 1986), which is a collection of various public interventions over the years; Idols of Civilization: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity in the Contemporary Polity (1991); Sovereign Power as People and as Nation (1999); Re-Conceptualizations of a World that Could Have Been Another (2001); War and Peace after the 'End of History' (2006).
To hear Professor Tsoukalas speak on the work of political theorist Nikos Poulantzas, who was his close friend and colleague in Paris during the late 60s and early 70s, is a rare opportunity and a privilege.
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Secularism and Cosmopolitanism
a lecture by Etienne Balibar
Thursday, October 1, 2009 :: 4:00pm :: Maison Française, Columbia University
Etienne Balibar, Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the Sorbonne and Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at the University of California, Irvine, is one of the most influential interdisciplinary thinkers alive today. From his early work as a collaborator of Louis Althusser to his Wellek Lectures on violence and civility (forthcoming from Columbia University Press), he has offered fundamental re-imaginings of such indispensable concepts such as ideology, freedom, class, universality, human rights, and the nature of the political. A powerful critic of the present, he has written with unique and prophetic eloquence about the links between racism, nationalism, and the plight of non-European immigrants in a newly unified Europe.